1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an artificial intelligence (A/I) system which simulates the voices of known personalities and characters for colloquy with telephone callers and, more particularly, to an artificial intelligence system which is activated by a telephone debit card.
2. Related Art
Artificial intelligence systems which are capable of simulating dialogue with a user are known. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,615,296 to Stanford discloses a continuous speech recognition and voice response system providing natural sounding and interactive speech driven dialogue from a data processing system. That system provides for the concatenation of words into phrases and sentences so that the recognition and simulation of natural language is improved. The system uses speaker-independent, continuous-speech to initiate the use of audio files and employs high-speed context switching to modify the active vocabulary of the system. The entire disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 5,615,296 is hereby incorporated by reference.
Voice animation systems which are capable of computer generated speech which sounds like a particular person are known. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,278,943 to Gasper discloses a voice animation system which decomposes pre-recorded samples of actual speech into basic segments to derive speech patterns of a particular speaker. The samples are used to provide parameters and coefficients in a text-to-speech synthesizer to artificially synthesize human quality speech with unlimited vocabulary in the voice of the person who provided the pre-recorded samples. The pre-recorded speech samples are further processed to add desired inflection and other auditory effects to create high-quality animated or artificial voices. The entire disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 5,278,943 is hereby incorporated by reference.
Telephone debit cards are also known. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,511,114 to Stimson discloses a pre-paid calling card system which enables customers to access a telephone network and obtain long distance telephone service. The management and processing of the system is effected by a host computer which is connectable to the telephone network. The host computer includes a data base for storing security numbers associated with authorized calling cards. The host computer permits one or more customers to access the telephone network using the authorized calling cards. The entire disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 5,511,114 is hereby incorporated by reference.
Unfortunately, the prior art does not disclose a system in which a telephone debit card provides access to only one set of predetermined telephone numbers such that only the predetermined telephone numbers may be called using the debit card.
Further, the prior art does not teach or suggest an A/I system coupled to a telephone network for which a caller, desirous of engaging in dialog with the A/I system, may select one personality among a plurality of known personalities for effecting the voice quality, inflection, colloquy, etc. of a natural language processor of the A/I system.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an improved A/I system which is coupled to a telephone network and which may be activated using a telephone debit card, to provide entertainment to children and adults in the form of simulated conversations with well known personalities and/or characters.